History

Brought to remembrance

A new museum and memorial testify to dark deeds from America’s past

Alabama is no stranger to a triple-digit heat index. It’s what makes the cotton grow and what brings tourists to its beaches. Even so, on Coosa Street in downtown Montgomery this August, visitors waiting to enter the new Legacy Museum appeared ill-prepared for the stifling temperatures. They fanned themselves with brochures collected from the visitor’s bureau and rolled up their shirt sleeves. A few blocks away, the heat also worked on ticket holders at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. In that outdoor structure, history—the full weight of it—hung as heavy as the humidity.

And that’s the point. Some 800 coffinlike monuments suspend in the pavilion, airing out centuries of racial grievances. They’re fashioned from corten steel, a brown-toned material that seems to bleed as it ages, and they’re engraved with the details of more than 4,000 lynchings, making tangible what organizers call “invisible history.” The lynching memorial opened in April, along with its twin museum. Together, they attempt to connect the historical dots between U.S. slavery, segregation, and injustice.

Harvard Law School graduate Bryan Stevenson provided the momentum for both projects through a nonprofit legal group he founded in 1989 called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). He says lynchings weren’t just brutal footnotes in history but rather reflected a belief system: “The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor. It was this ideology of white supremacy, this narrative of racial difference. That’s the narrative we haven’t actually come to grips with. That was the true toxin that poisoned our nation.”

Statues of slaves outside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
(Brynn Anderson/AP)

Toxin trouble is nothing new in Montgomery. Known as the cradle of the Confederacy, the city was once the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama. Later, Montgomerians jailed Rosa Parks and bombed Martin Luther King Jr.’s home. Still, EJI purposefully headquartered in the city. Last year, while riots raged over Confederate monuments two states away in Charlottesville, Va., a different type of memorial took shape in Montgomery, one that shows the evils of racial sin. Stevenson points out the problem of romanticizing pockets of the past: He says his goal is “to create a deeper understanding of our history so we understand what’s appropriate to honor and what’s not appropriate to honor.”

The designers of the lynching memorial expect that kind of understanding to come incrementally. Upon entry, visitors encounter the hanging 6-foot monuments at eye level, but as they turn into the next corridor and the next, the columns rise overhead. The effect is meant to convey the scale of terror: “Lynching was gratuitous,” Stevenson says. “They didn’t have to hang people and lift those bodies up, but they did it because they wanted to traumatize and taunt communities of color.”

While the memorial’s design is visually arresting, the entries etched on the columns are not. They’re understated, like the scant 24 characters on the Jones County, Miss., monument that reference the lynching of John Hartfield. To learn Hartfield’s back story, visitors must see exhibits at the 11,000-square-foot Legacy Museum. One of its walls displays a headline from the June 26, 1919, edition of the New Orleans States: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched by Ellisville Mob at 5 O’clock This Afternoon.” Yards away, a jar of soil from Hartfield’s lynching site sits among hundreds of others collected as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. In another spot, videos document the details of Hartfield’s brutal, extrajudicial hanging—the 10,000 spectators, the food vendors, the photo postcards, the souvenir amputated fingers.

Bryan Stevenson
(Handout)

Ellisville, Miss., Pastor Luke Johnson, 35, only learned of John Hartfield after the Legacy Museum opened. When he polled a few members of First Baptist Church, he discovered no one else had heard of Hartfield either. The lynching was, as the EJI purports, invisible history.

Johnson couldn’t shake the story. “I started asking around, doing research. What I found was that by the second generation, the people of Ellisville had stopped talking about Mr. Hartfield.” He believes the whole matter had been swept under the rug. “They became complicit. No righteous man stood up.”

As Johnson studied Biblical examples of community confession led by Ezra and Daniel, he began to consider the effects of generational sin on his congregation. “I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been swallowing a camel for 99 years while we’ve strained out gnats,” he acknowledges.

Johnson plans to reach out to other pastors in the area about addressing these issues and asking for God’s mercy and forgiveness. He believes that’s Biblical: “I could live the rest of my life ignoring John Hartfield, but that would be sin. Pastors would be wise to know the history where they serve. If there’s glaring sin in the community, then they’re God’s representatives to deal with it.”

Organizers at the new lynching memorial hope that “dealing with it” includes acknowledgment, and that’s why they included a nonstatic element in their plans. Duplicate monuments, with the same dimensions and engravings as those in the pavilion, line walkways in a parklike portion of the grounds. Communities can work with EJI to claim and install them in their respective counties across the United States. Whether over time the monuments leave Montgomery—or don’t—may become the most telling exhibit of all.

Comments

Brendan Bossard

This is a constructive step toward reconciliation. I applaud Mr. Stevenson and Pastor Johnson for taking these steps. I look forward to learning more.

Just Me 999

Posted: Fri, 10/05/2018 03:05 pm

This country has been cruel to a number of ethnic groups.

Irish Americans had large numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other "undesirables" who were sent to labor in the colonies against their will.

A vast majority of workers for Central Pacific were Chinese immigrants by the time the railroad was finished. These immigrants faced particularly poor working conditions and fierce discrimination.

During the 1840s, American shippers expanded transporting indentured Chinese workers throughout the Americas—but not the United States—to provide cheap labor in mines and plantations. Indenture contracts, and the bodies to go with them, were auctioned off upon arrival at port.

The Bracero Program—a large guestworker program in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s admitted hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to work temporarily on U.S. farms and in other low-wage occupations which César Chávez fought against.

Native Indian groups were forced under Andrew Jackson on a massive deportation west of the Mississippi into what would later be known as "reservations".

Italians upon first arriving in New York city were forced to live in the worst section of New York referred to as Mulberry Bend where "one room 12x12 with five families living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partitions, screen, chair or table." This is an example of the worst type of living conditions. Life in the tenements was grim. The plaster was always falling down; there was no drinking water for days, pipes froze in the winter; bedbugs were commonplace. Racial hatred against Italians in New Orleans was so bad in 1891 a mob of 5,000 angry New Orleaneans stormed the jail and shot 11 Italian men to death in their cells. They had been rounded up because of the alleged "Sicilian mob" which was nothing but discrimination.

Currently our country has an issue with exploitation of workers brought in under the H-2B program. Which was written up just recently.

Solideo

Posted: Sun, 10/14/2018 04:36 pm

I appreciate World's coverage of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I'm currently reading Bryan Stevenson's book Just Mercy, and it's been eye-opening for me. I'm very glad to have encountered the book. It reminds me somewhat of the series Dr. Olasky did on the death penalty several years ago. I wondered whether World ever reviewed it when it was a NYT bestseller a few years ago, but I couldn't find a review on the website. I would love to hear World's reviewers' thoughts on Just Mercy if you would consider adding it to the list of books to review. Thanks for keeping us informed, World.